Words: Catherine Bray
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He’s among Britain’s greatest living directors, and he’s back in the city settings he loves for his latest film, charting an Indian slum kid’s progress up the ranks on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? We catch up with Danny Boyle, director of Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, and now the film that could eclipse them all: Slumdog Millionaire.

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Not that many interviews begin with a globally respected film director spontaneously reassuring their interviewer regarding the current state of the economy. And not too many interviews also incorporate a debate on how and where the women of Indian slums manage to dispose of their excrement in such total secrecy compared to their unabashed menfolk, who think nothing of shitting in the street. But then Danny Boyle, comfortably placed within Britain’s top five finest living directors for the best part of a decade, isn’t someone you would ever call a predictable interviewee.

“You’ll be fine,” he assures me, having opened the conversation with small talk about the dire state of the economy. “How old are you? Oh, you’ll be fine. I remember there was a crisis the first time we brought a proper house. We bought it at the top of the property boom for £189,000, and literally the next week the market crashed and it was suddenly worth, like, £114,000, and it was negative equity. Awful.”

As ever with Danny, the world of film is never more than a sentence away, and true to form he segues swiftly into reminiscence: “I remember meeting Anthony Minghella at the time - late ‘80s, early ‘90s, just after this crash - and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it; you’ll be fine.’ He was right.”

Economy dealt with, time to tackle the really big issues. Time to talk crap, literally. The reason Danny has shite firmly on the brain when we meet for an hour’s chat at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden is that his latest film, Slumdog Millionaire, is partly set precisely where the name might suggest: the slums of Mumbai.

Where, Danny is keen to convey: “You do get shit all over you. There’s nowhere to shit; people shit everywhere. Although you never see the women shitting. I was there a year, on and off, and for eight months full-time. You see men doing it all the time. Men and boys. All the time - and you have to get your head around that. But you never see women.”

He pauses to allow the mystery to fully sink in. “There were all these rumours: ‘Oh, they get up in the night’ - but I was up in the night, and I never saw them. There are these little plastic bags everywhere, tied up very neatly. It must be that; that’s the only logical explanation.”

You’ll hear many directors pontificate about getting their hands dirty and bonding as a team, but most of them don’t have contending with the open toilets of Mumbai in mind. Yet without sounding pretentious, Danny manages to turn talk of the most ignoble of circumstances into a subtle point about a working system in which, despite the inherently hierarchical nature of feature film production, basic equalities are acknowledged.

“You can’t get all squeamish about it. We all do it; we’ve just got a very elaborate way of disposing of it over here. It happened to most of us there - it didn’t happen to me, I was very lucky - but it happened that most of us were caught short at some point.”

“Your British crew are mortified that they’ve just had to go in front of you, but there’s nowhere to go. Your Indian crew just look at you and shrug. I remember Thomas the gaffer being caught short; we were on this little island, nothing there. But it was kind of liberating, because we’re so guarded, so private, about that sort of thing in the West, and yet we all do it.”

Whether down to the defecatory egalitarianism of its crew or not, one of the great things about Slumdog Millionaire is that although it successfully holds a magnifying glass to the underbelly of India’s slums, it doesn’t patronise its subject, or seek to suggest that just because your street is your toilet that your life must likewise be a pile of crap.

Like Charles Dickens did well over a century before, writer Simon Beaufoy [The Full Monty] captures in his script for Slumdog Millionaire something of the haphazard, teeming reality of an enormous hive of a city in flux, changing faster than it has at probably any other point in its history. Within that setting, our good-hearted hero, Jamal [Dev Patel, Skins], suffers the slings and arrows that come with a truly outrageous fortune, as he tries to win the woman he loves - if that means going on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, so be it. Danny concurs wholeheartedly with the idea that despite the modern trappings, there’s a Dickensian vibe at work here.

“It’s classic storytelling, isn’t it? The first thing Simon said to me after I read the script and we met was, ‘It’s Dickens. It’s classic Dickens.’ You can’t avoid the shadow of Dickens. It’s absolute fable. Highs and lows, slight hysteria, convenience, coincidence, good brother, bad brother, impossibly beautiful and unattainable girl taken away whenever you get close.”

Perhaps slightly wired on the strong coffee we’re drinking, Danny talks fast and fluently on this topic; clearly a subject that’s dear to him. “We’ve lost that in the West; we’ve exiled the extreme stuff to fantasy and superhero movies. The stuff that’s left is very cerebral, quite dry, serious drama. Maybe a bit of child abuse thrown in, to pep things up. But for this film, Simon embraced this rich, architectured style of Dickensian writing.”

Although the fate-led storytelling itself presents an enjoyably vivid, heightened reality in which plausibility is left by the wayside, the backdrop against which Simon and Danny’s narrative plays out - and the cities they capture so strongly - feel one-hundred-percent true to life.

That’s probably because unlike, say, Wes Anderson (whose 2008 film The Darjeeling Limited features some of the most nauseatingly glib, depressingly crass, and fundamentally dishonest depictions of India ever committed to film), Danny Boyle headed east aiming to capture something of what was really out there, and not simply to depict what was in his head before he went.

Coming with a pre-packaged notion of an entire continent, as some directors do, is rarely the best approach in film-making, and it’s not something local crews warm to either, Danny found.

“They’re funny: the Indian crews say to you, ‘Ah, there’ll be cows in your movie, yeah?’ and they’re taking the piss, because they expect a Westerner to turn up and make it all about shots of sacred cows and all that stuff. So we tried to avoid that,” Danny laughs. “There are a couple of cows in it actually, but they’re incidental cows; you couldn’t avoid them. But you don’t try to crowbar them in. You can’t come with your film pre-made. Obviously you’ve got your scripts, but you’re genuinely open to change.”

A rapport with an Indian crew established, Danny credits his Indian co-director Loveleen Tandan with helping him avoid other cultural clangers. “She started out as casting director, but helped me in every way it’s possible to imagine. You need that; you need somebody who’s got the confidence to tell the director they’re wrong, which a lot of people lack. People just want a quiet life. Culturally, she would tell me if I was wrong about things.”

At this point I raise the spectre of Woody Allen’s later London films. “That’s the problem! Especially with legends. Who’s going to tell a legend, ‘Doesn’t happen like that, love?’ They just go, ‘Sure Woody, fantastic.”

Co-directing with a large local team in a fast-moving foreign country involves a degree of trust and collaboration not often associated with the archetypal lone auteur, an image that still hangs over what we feel great direction might look like. But would a perfectionist, Kubrickean style of film-making ever have worked on a film like this?

“It isn’t a controlled environment, but I think Kubrick would have responded to it. It does make you rethink the way you work straight away. If you want to control Mumbai or change it, or alter it, you might as well go home, because you’re just going to waste money.”

Lest we run away with the idea that Slumdog was filmed on the fly, guerrilla-style, Danny clarifies: “It’s not documentary-type shooting. You’re ambitious - you’re not just recording it as-is - but you don’t try to clear the street or drive it all away, you work around it. If you do try to create a controlled environment, it looks fake. We did a few scenes, and you look at it and go, ‘That’s not Mumbai.’ And you have to dump it and start again.”

As he talks about Mumbai and Eastern psychological differences, it would be easy to get the impression that Danny had undergone a Lennon-esque enlightenment in India, a circumstance that - were it true - you would be right to treat with suspicion, given the slump in quality that too often follows such apparent conversions in the creative industries.

This was certainly a concern for executives at Pathé and Warners when they found out that a third of their supposedly English-language film could now be lost in translation. Danny remembers an awkward phone-call.

“I had to ring Warners and Pathé and tell them a third of the film would now be in Hindi with subtitles. And the silence, Catherine, when I said that. The silence on the other end of the phone… I was in this hotel room very late at night, because LA had just got up, and the silence, the silence!” He laughs again, recalling what one can only imagine as the excruciating tension of that moment. “You could tell they thought, ‘He’s gone insane. He’s going to bring back a fucking yoga film about hippies and Hindi and maharishis.’ That was what they really thought.”

It would eventually become apparent even to studio execs that the change in language for the sections of the film involving young Indian children was the only way to go, and was not symptomatic of a moment of mistaken whimsy on the part of the director.

“Obviously we’d originally sold an English film to Warners and Pathé. But we got out there and started auditions, and of course the only kids that speak English at seven - and even then not very well - are the middle-class kids. Very highly educated kids. And they were so wrong.”

It wasn’t all about their speech: the childhood obesity issue is not confined to Britain. “They’ve got a fast-food problem in India, and the middle-class kids look chubby. I’d be going location scouting with Loveleen around the slums in the afternoons, and the kids look completely different. They’re skinny, they’re lithe - they’re survivors.”

Trusted advisor Loveleen stepped up to the plate at this point and convinced Danny that the portions of the script covering our hero Jamal’s childhood would have to be filmed in Hindi. “So I did it. That’s the joy of not taking too much money. You can take unilateral decisions like that and just say, ‘Translate it.’ We did it and it came alive. The film took off - whoof! - like that.”

I hazard a guess that another major factor in Slumdog Millionaire’s artistic success is that Danny is back in his element: filming in a big city. I trail off mid-sentence, searching for an agreeable way to end a thought that began: “You film cities so well, better than…”

Danny steps in to spare me the embarrassment: “Better than I do other stuff. I can certainly say that. I certainly feel at home. I like nature within the city, but I just don’t get on with the ski-slopes or the beaches or the countryside. They’re fine for a day, two days maximum, but then it’s just, ‘Where are the people?’ Give me the people!”

Indeed, in its frenetic, affectionate story of an underdog struggling against odds stacked high against him in a big city, surrounded by urban contempt for his ‘loser’ status, Slumdog summons Danny’s first major breakthrough, Trainspotting, irresistibly to mind. And of course there’s Slumdog’s soon-to-be infamous toilet-diving scene, something Danny is acutely aware will draw comparisons with the earlier film.

“I was aware of the toilet when we were doing it, and it’s one of the few times when I was really, really aware - ‘I’ve been here before’ - and normally, if you ever have an instinct like that, you change the scene so you’ve not been there before. But it was such a good scene, we had to leave it in.”

We’re back to that British obsession again: “We’re obsessed with toilets. We’re British. You see hundreds of films abroad; you won’t see a toilet in any of them.”

Slumdog Millionaire’s successful mixing of the spirit of Mumbai, of slum kids, Hindi and a country in fast-forward, with British touchstones of Dickensian storytelling, quiz-shows and toilets, anchored successfully by the performance of Skins’ Dev Patel in a breakout lead role, should strike a chord with a national and international audience. Crucially, it’s a film that it’s difficult to imagine being made in any other way, by any other director.

Balancing his healthy respect for his own instincts - and those of his trusted advisers - with a practical awareness of studios’ cash-flow fears seems to be a hallmark of Danny’s working methods. It’s something he illustrates with a story about the difficulties of marrying the ideals of a script with the realities of filming.

“You have to get permission to film everywhere,” he laments as he discusses the film’s various locations. “We ran that side of it like a parallel universe to the film. The bureaucracy, the rubber-stamping, this stuff that takes an eternity, sometimes years - that was run entirely separately as far as possible. You try not to let it affect you as you film; if it did you’d never get the film made. We’d still be there.”

“So the guys apply for what we wanted, and we’d be filming, not thinking about this whole parallel universe, and generally being quite light-hearted about the process.” But when it came to filming at the Taj Mahal, compromise was needed as the ocean of bureaucracy collided with the directorial vision, and the practicalities of interacting with a different culture.

The Taj Mahal and surrounding area is run entirely on the income generated by the tourism at the Taj, overseen by what Danny describes as a “sort of mafia really: photographers, tour-guides, you know. It’s quite sophisticated. They saw us turn up with these kids, and gradually they realised what we were up to and got annoyed. Very annoyed. They got heavy at one point, and we got chased out.”

“The parallel universe guys realised we had a problem, packed our bags and drove us out of there at high speed. We weren’t really finished, but had to cross the state border before they injuncted the film, which could trap it in the courts for five years. Five years waiting for them to release the film, imagine.”

Knowing how to pick your battles, when to persist doggedly, and whose advice to trust are clearly key skills for anyone hoping to juggle executive expectations linked to huge sums of money with, on the other hand, the subtler concerns of good storytelling that are the reason you’re filming in the first place.

It’s surely no coincidence that Danny found himself drawn to a script in which just such a juggling act is played out. The film’s hero Jamal meets an endless stream of compromises and short-term setbacks, but never backs down in the long-term pursuit of his ultimate goal. Even when interrogated by the powers that be as to just what exactly he thinks he’s playing at.

As a judge of Film Dash, I was hugely excited to watch the films that resulted from the 48 hour film challenge. Perhaps as interesting as the finished product is the journey that the filmmakers themselves went on as they made their films. Here’s just one of those stories, from filmmaker Ian Ravenscroft, who with only a few no-budget sketches under his belt, set out with Dice Productions to tell their story.

With no camera, sound equipment or lighting, and our only actor delayed on his way back from Cheltenham, I sat awaiting the brief for Film Dash: Digital Galore!, Birmingham’s latest 48-hour film competition, wondering what I’d let myself in for.

My cohort Louis arrived after a brisk run through Birmingham just as organiser Chris Unitt was kicking off proceedings. Soon, each team had a line of dialogue to include in their 5min film and a film title to reference in any way we could. Before we knew it we were outside, walking on auto-pilot, brain-storming as we went.

“I don’t believe the world has been in such a terrible mess since the flood,” I said, repeated our line in hope of some inspiration. “The Cruel Sea,” Louis chanted, hoping the same. It was at this point I realised how much of a challenge we had taken on.

Despite the stuttering start, we were soon cooking on gas. With a last-minute favour of a camera from @Warblefly productions and our actor and writing partner Tom back in the picture, we collected our thoughts and picked an idea off the crammed whiteboard.

“A young couple move into a flat only to meet their crazed and sexually-confused landlord” someone suggested. “Why not?” we thought, “we’ll get the line in, no problem.” By 9:30pm we had the whole thing written on two sides of a big sheet of paper, possibly our biggest achievement of the weekend.

Having set up our limited gear, typed up the script, recruited a much-needed female to the cast and planned each scene, we set out on Saturday morning for the shoot. Tom seemed to relish the job of playing such an odd character and everything seemed to go pretty smoothly and everyone was having fun, so by 3pm we had the first batch of editing to do. Then we shot the night scenes and retired to the pub to unwind after a hectic day.

On arriving back to base we found, as expected, that there was way too much footage. The only option was an all-night editing session to cut back the cinematic undergrowth. Louis and I broke the back of the editing overnight, checking our plot progression and using every shortcut we knew. After three hours sleep, a re-shoot of the final scene and some hasty sound editing we were finished in every sense.

Although there were bits we could have fine-tuned with more time and expertise, we were happy with our ambitious effort (for us, in the time) and could overlook the odd bad cut for how it had come together.

We felt we covered the brief well, and with a few nods to Hitchcock we felt we had forged links with the screening of ‘Into the Light’, a celebration of Birmingham born film producer, Sir Michael Balcon, which the winning film would be shown before the following Sunday.

Not that winning should be on any of the teams’ minds. Film Dash was a great laugh to take part in and taught us a lot about our own abilities. If it was intended to inspire new filmmakers like ourselves it certainly worked, we’re already planning more film projects and eagerly awaiting the next Dash!

The winner of Film Dash will be announced Sunday 26th October.

It’s taken us 2 solid weeks, but we can now proudly announce the shortlists for the 4Talent Awards 2008 - 5 in each of the 20 categories.

We’ve quite simply been blown away by the quality across the board, and it’s been a real struggle getting down to that fortunate 100, who will be sent off to our illustrious judging panels over the next few weeks to select our final 20.

So here they are: massive congratulations if you’re amongst them, and please, don’t be disheartened if you’re not - stay across future opportunities with 4Talent and there’s always next year! Winners will be notified by 31 October.

Short Documentary
Pinny Grylls, 29, London
David O’Hara, 25, Scunthorpe
Poppie Skold, 26, London
Maria Andrade, 26, London
Laura Martin-Robinson, 28, London

Long Documentary
Fred Burns, 24, Sussex
Katja Roberts, 29 & Magnus Dennison, Newcastle
Tom Evans, 28, Oxford
Lorne Kramer, 25, Bristol
Stuart Kershaw, 28, Liverpool

Dramatic Writing
Ali Muriel, 28, London
Cosmo Wallace, 29, Glasgow
Carla Grauls, 29, London
Tim Price, 28, London
Stella Papamichael, 30, London

Dramatic Performance
Sarah Kempton, 22, London
Elizabeth Rainbow, 28, London
Emma Rigby, 19, Liverpool
Sagar Radia, 22, Middlesex
Helen Clapp, 25, London

Directing
Tom Marshall, 22, Middlesbrough
Adam Randall, 28, London
Dominic Leclerc, 29, Bradford
Robert Glassford, 29 & Timo Langer, West Lothian
Rob Sorrenti, 28, London

Comedy Writing
Felicity Carpenter, 27, London
Chris Grady, 29, Glasgow
Rose Heiney, 24, London
Christopher Wallace, 29, & Philip Hodgson,Tyne & Wear
Daniel Flay, 24 & Alastair Craig, Huntingdon

Comedy Performance
Anna Whelan, 23 & David Tynan, Wigan / Sheffield
Greg McHugh, 28, Glasgow
Vikki Stone, 25, London
Napoleon Ryan, 30, Kent
Eddie Kadi, 25, London

Presenting
Carly Lindon-Forrester, 23, Liverpool
Laura Marks, 22, Glasgow
Amelia Gildea, 23, Wiltshire
Ben Chancellor, 30, London
James Sherwood, 25, Kent

On-Air Radio
Alex Baker, 25, Birmingham
Adam Edworthy, 22, Coventry
Alex James Atkinson, 27, Manchester
Veena Virahsammy, 21, Barking
Steve Folland, 29, Hertfordshire

Off-Air Radio
Andy Ward, 23, Sussex
Simon Buschenfeld, 30, Bristol
Philip Dyer, 29, London
Matt Horne, 26 & Colin Greaves, Gateshead
Ann Scantlebury, 23, London

Music
Toby Trueman, 26 - The Icarus, Edinburgh
Oliver Harrison, 21 - Fossil Club, Bristol
Camille Davila, 29, Cambridgeshire
Louis Standard, 19 - Pinstripe, Avon
Iain Woods, 22, Brighton

Production Music
Ella Spira, 20, London
Blair Mowat, 22, Edinburgh
Chris Hanson, 26, London
Richard Mead, 29, Maidstone
Richard Bradley, 28, Sheffield

Music Video
Ian Smith, 26, Oxford
James Cook, 22, Durham
James Knott & James Curran, 26, Derby
Steven Quinn, 27, Belfast
James Willis, 23, Humberside

Innovation
Becki Burrows, 27, London
Jack Lenox, 21, Surrey
Kay Vasey, 29 & Jonny Emmanuel, London
Mike Young, 23, Hertfordshire
Phil Mundy, 27, Huddersfield

Multi-platform
Chi-chi Ekweozor, 29, Manchester
Dan Hon, 29, London
Steve Ellis, 26, Birmingham
Mike Cunsolo, 28, Sheffield
Claire-Frances Lennon, 25, Glasgow

Animation
Ian Wharton, 23 & Edward Shires, Preston
Mark Nute, 29, Gateshead
Jessica Cope, 24, North Yorkshire
Karen Penman, 28 & Liam Brazier, Essex
Cassiano Prado, 30, London

Journalism
Rob Sharp, 28, London
Hassan Ghani, 23, Slough
Natalie Whelan, 22, London
Lauren Carter, 23, Hertfordshire
Lee Coan, 29, Hertfordshire

Photography
Lucinda Chua, 23, Nottingham
Ellie Harvey, 22, London
Hal Sear, 24, Watford
Eleanor Hardwick, 15, Reading
Loubie-Lou photography, 30, Leicester

Multi-talented
Rob Madin, 22, Chesterfield
Oliver Lansley, 27, Surrey
James Roberts, 23, London
Allyn Lawson, 22, Warwickshire
Jamie Stone, 23, Edinburgh

Wildcard
Chris O’Shea, 27, London
Johanna Basford, 25, Dundee
David Procter, 25, London
Amy Winters, 24 & Kseniya Zagorodnyuk, London
Tanya Richam-Odoi, 27, Leeds

Award-winning filmmaker James Lees guest-blogs from the Sarajevo Film Festival.

Attending Sarajevo Film Festival was a bit of a last minute decision for me. I have always thought it would be a great festival to check out but there are so many out there. As it was, a filmmaker I know, Chris Bates was already over there filming some footage for a documentary he was working on. Chris and I had actually discussed his documentary on numerous occasions since he had come to speak to me after a Screen WM film event I was talking at. He had some great ideas for films set in Bosnia but needed some help pinning down the best story to tell and finding funding. Chris asked me to come out and help him shoot some footage and meet his contacts at the film festival - how could I say no?

My own film The Apology Line was actually being screened at the festival as part of the European Film Academy Prix UIP Award Winners Programme and the EFA asked me if I would give a Q&A after the screening. I have been working with the EFA since the film won the Prix UIP Best European Short at Cork International Film Festival (a great festival to attend by the way and coming up again October 12 to 19th) which meant it was also nominated in the Short Film Category of the European Film Awards, this year being held in Copenhagen.

I landed in Sarajevo and Chris picked me up and drove me to his family’s place in town. I was immediately struck with the contrast between the shiny, glossy modern architectural experiments in office design and the bullet and grenade-pocked walls of concrete communist block apartment blocks. Here was a city clearly in transition, but a long way from shaking off its dark and violent history.

After a quick tour I got straight to the festival and settled myself down in front of a few films. First up was My Winnipeg, and the second was Divorce Albanian Style, a film about three Albanian couples pulled apart by the strict regime of Enver Hoxha, two films that couldn’t be more different in tone. My Winnipeg was truly original and charming which can rarely be said but it did feel like Guy Maddin could have taken the ideas and approach further. Divorce Albanian Style was very formulaic and straight in its approach but with such a devastating human story to tell this was perhaps unavoidable.

Next up: the post-screening Q&A - the director’s perspective.

After pitching a behind-the-scenes film about the workings of Channel 4 to a panel of big wigs, Summer School placement Catherine Madden reflects on how it felt.

So you’ve worked on an idea that you feel passionate about. You know it has potential, and the thought of anyone ripping it to shreds and making you feel stupid is terrifying. But realistically, how many commissioners ever say, “Wonderful, I love everything about that idea, here’s £10k to develop it?” I went into the boardroom knowing that it wouldn’t be perfect, but prepared to learn something so that next time, I’d be better.

Each of the four ideas we were pitching was very different, but hopefully shared the following characteristics: challenging, insightful, funny, visual, intimate, and the list goes on. You’d almost think I really knew what I was talking about.

I felt confident that we’d come up with great ideas, but that’s what everyone thinks before going into a pitch. But more than anything else, this experience taught me that while there’s no such thing as the perfect idea, presenting your pitch perfectly is a good start.

I was given several tips, all of which are simple to follow. Make things as visual as possible when you describe them: a commissioner wants to visualise the story. But definitely don’t hand out paper before you start: they’ll spend their time reading that rather than paying attention to you. And to introduce your pitch, sum up your idea in one line.

But the best bit of advice was to be yourself. Commissioners are only human; they’re not waiting for you to slip up. If you’re not quite sure about a certain aspect, ask for advice. Don’t try to sound like you know what you’re talking about when you don’t: they’ll see right through you. But providing you’re passionate about the idea and you prepare well, all you can do is learn - even if you don’t get the commission.

Watch this space for updates on how the Summer School placements get on.

Six young directing talents journeyed up to the Edinburgh International Film Festival as part of 4Talent and Film4’s Directors’ Lab. We asked a couple of them to give us a potted glimpse at what they’re up to.

“We started off the day with Mia Bays, the independent producer and Microwave head don,” begins Charles-Henri Belleville. “Mia talked passionately and insightfully for 90 minutes on exactly how the food chain in the film industry works. Very revealing.”

“We then had an interactive session with JJ Lousberg (UKFC), Danny Perkins from Optimum Releasing and Sam Horley, a sales agent. This was superb - we split into teams, each were given a distribution company and their budgets. We had to purchase two films from Sam that made the most money, with Danny supporting us. Sam is tough and Danny is a great negotiator. Very educational, but also had everyone in the room in stitches as us directors pitched our hearts out!”

“Amy and I rocked,” adds Hope Dickson Leach [Day 1]. “We got This Is England and Ratcatcher - I like to think it was because of the photo-shoots we had planned for Shane Meadows in ID magazine…”

“We had an amazing meal at Howies - great fun meeting producers over the best soup I have ever had. Honey and parsnip: sensational,” Charlie continues. “Our fireside chat was with Caroline Cooper-Charles from Warp X and Donkey Punch director Olly Blackburn. It’s clear Warp X has something very special going on, and Olly is destined for great things - he really inspired us all with his humility. If you ever meet him, ask to hear his story about Wild Turkey at sunset…”

Charles-Henri has directed promos for Ashley Walters, MTV and Pathé. His first micro budget feature The Inheritance (2007) was nominated for Best British Feature at Raindance Film Festival 2007 and subsequently won the inaugural Raindance Award at the British Independent Film Awards 2007. Charles-Henri was nominated for Best New Director at the BAFTA Scotland New Talent Awards 2008 and for the 4Talent Awards 2007. He is currently in post-production on his next feature Midnight Madness, a basketball documentary.

Six young directing talents journeyed up to the Edinburgh International Film Festival as part of 4Talent and Film4’s Directors’ Lab. We asked a couple of them to give us a potted glimpse at what they’re up to.

“Day one and we’re off with a bang,” begins Hope Dickson Leach. “We began the day meeting all those people it would take months to see you in their office, and it was great to hear them talk. I’m not going to tell you what they said, as that’s classified and I’d have to find you and kill you all, but believe me, I wasn’t the only one taking notes and raising my hand to ask the questions.”

“We’re all here with a mission, and that mission is to make movies. Despite the fact everyone is doing their best to convince us that making a first feature is impossible, we all know it happens, so why can’t it be us?”

“All six of us are writer-directors and we were lucky enough to meet talented and busy screenwriter David Nicholls (Starter for Ten, And When Did You Last See Your Father?) who filled us with inspiration about how receptive the industry is becoming to involving writers in more than just the opening stages of the film-making process.”

“And then off to the beautiful castle-side apartment for a ‘fireside chat’ with Isabelle Coixet (Elegy) who told us, like your favourite pair of trainers that just keeps on giving, to just do it. With that in mind we were off to the premiere of the Warp X produced (debut film) Donkey Punch, and then their kick-ass party. Which leaves me feeling quite warped myself as I dash off to today’s fantastic lineup. More from us tomorrow.”

Hope made her short film The Dawn Chorus (2006) as part of her MFA program at Columbia University. Her film was selected for Sundance Film Festival 2007, Edinburgh International Film Festival 2006, London International Film Festival 2006, and won Best Narrative Student Short at Austin Film Festival 2006. In 2007 Hope was named as a Star of Tomorrow by Screen International and as one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker magazine. She is currently developing her first feature film English Rose, about a teenage girl who hates Princess Diana, which was featured in the Berlinale Project Talent Market 2008.

“We are thrilled by the success of our two very British films currently in the cinemas – Mike Leigh’s charming Happy-Go-Lucky and Martin McDonagh’s irreverent In Bruges. Martin, famous for his playwriting, initially made a short film with Film4 so we were delighted to work with him on his first feature. Each year we strive for a mix of first-timers and experienced film-makers returning to Film4.

I am desperate to find a brilliant, ambitious and yet low-budget British sci-fi. It’s also really hard to find incredibly taut British thrillers that are not just aping US films – we would love to find one not set in the usual environs: perhaps an NHS hospital, or a boarding school?

Film4 is all about innovation, supporting the film-maker’s voice, coming at British stories from new perspectives, finding stories that resonate strongly with our contemporary British audience. We’ll continue to be driven by these principles, building on our already strong focus on new talent and film-makers from diverse and regional backgrounds.

We offer many of the best opportunities for new talent in the country, in terms of the films we produce – both short films (through the Cinema Extreme scheme), low-budget first features (via Warp X), and other first-time film-makers we support outside these schemes. We also run projects with new theatre writers via Paines Plough and the Traverse theatre; have a new writers’ lab for writers from diverse backgrounds with B3 Media, and back one or two projects in development from film-makers at the NFTS every year. We’ll continue to concentrate on our new talent initiatives for both directors and writers to secure our position as the home of new film talent in the UK.

There’s already an increasing awareness that British films telling contemporary British stories can work for British audiences in the cinema – look at This Is England – and it would be great to see more contemporary-set films taking risks coming from the industry as a whole. Certainly the US is more than aware of the huge talent pool in the UK film industry right now, so our job is to keep supporting new voices whilst trying to entice our successful British film-makers home now and again!”

Katherine Butler: Head of Development, Film4

“I want more disabled people on screen across all genres and channels, from Vanity Lair to Hollyoaks, Grand Designs to Shipwrecked. And more disabled talent behind the camera – via new talent strands (3MW, Comedy Lab, Coming Up) and targeted series like New Shoots (2007) which gave 12 disabled directors their first half-hour documentary credit. This year The Shooting Party brought together a group of nine disabled directors to make short films, and follows their progress as they carve out a place in the demanding world of film-making. What’s next year’s challenge?”

Alison Walsh: Editorial Manager, Disability, Channel 4

Next on 4 is Channel 4’s vision for the future. Fresh talent, fresh perspectives, youth, diversity and innovation in all its forms will lead and shape the channel’s content in the years to come. So with our readers in mind, we asked those at the commissioning coalface what’s pushing their buttons in 2008.

Who we spoke to:

Liam Humphreys, Commissioning Editor, Features | Walter Iuzzolino, Deputy Head, Features | Dominique Walker, Commissioning Editor, Factual Entertainment | Alistair Pegg, Editor, Factual Entertainment | Ruby Kuraishe, Editor, Factual Entertainment, E4 | Simon Dickson, Deputy Head, Documentaries | Meredith Chambers, Commissioning Editor, Documentaries | Kate Vogel, Editor, 3 Minute Wonder | Jan Younghusband, Commissioning Editor, Arts & Performance | Shane Allen, Commissioning Editor, Comedy | Andy Auerbach, Commissioning Editor, Entertainment | Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor, Education | Jo Roach, Commissioning Editor, Education | Kevin Sutcliffe, Deputy Head, News & Current Affairs | Camilla Campbell, Commissioning Editor, Drama | Adam Gee, Commissioning Editor, New Media Factual | Aaquil Ahmed, Commissioning Editor, Religion | David Glover, Commissioning Editor, Science | Katherine Butler, Head of Development, Film4 | Ade Rawcliffe, Diversity & Talent Manager | Alison Walsh, Editorial Manager, Disability.

Browse all the responses >

Image by Tom Gaul

Across 20 categories the 4Talent Awards tip exciting individuals with the potential to make a difference, as judged both by commissioners and the producers who supply them.

All the info on how to apply for the 4Talent Awards is here.

We now have over half of the 40 (yes, 40) judges on side:

Kate Vogel, Editor, 3 Minute Wonder (C4)
Sarah Mulvey, Commissioning Editor, Documentaries (C4)
Robert Wulff-Cochrane, Senior Development Editor, Drama (C4)
Caroline Leddy, Commissioning Editor, Comedy (C4)
Victoria Pile, Writer, Green Wing, Smack the Pony
Shane Allen, Commissioning Editor, Comedy (C4)
Ben Caudell, Creative Director @ Zeppotron
Liza Marshall, Head of Drama (C4)
Charlie Pattinson, Exec Producer @ Company (Shameless)
Cath Lovesey, Editor, Music (C4)
Lana Webb, Head of Music @ Remedy
Debbie David, Commissioning Editor, T4 (C4)
Richard Cook, Exec Producer @ Eyeworks (T4, Popworld)
Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor, Education (C4)
James Kirkham, Manager Director @ Holler
Dorothy Byrne, Head of News & Current Affairs (C4)
Alice Tonge, Art Director, 4Creative (C4)
Ewen Spencer, Freelance photographer (shot for Skins)
Ruth Fielding, Managing Director @ Lupus Films
Adam Gee, Commissioning Editor, New Media Factual (C4)
James Estill, Senior Producer, 4Talent (C4)

Further updates on the way soon.

Words: Nick Carson
Images: Courtesy of Framestore CFC & Ninja Theory

They were once a printmaker, a NASA shuttle engineer, a sound technician and a software developer. Nibbled by the CGI bug, they changed tack - and left in their wake the likes of Monsters Inc, Batman Begins and The World is Not Enough. Now they’re giving something back: 4Talent magazine grills the battle-hardened tutors at Escape Studios about the many facets of computer graphics.

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Escape’s manifesto is simple: “to provide the global computer graphics community with the best training, technology and talent in the world.” While in-house tutor and recently-crowned Maya Master Lee Danskin insists that there’s “no such thing as a 3D industry” per se, one thing that film, TV, games and commercials share is a voracious thirst for CGI production talent. It’s just the way it’s applied that differs.

Character design

“Character design is about injecting life. You may not be able to draw, but if you can sculpt then it’s much easier,” suggests Escape’s Character guru Nick Savy, whose proudest spot on his showreel is an indistinguishable 3D stunt-double for Christian Bale in Batman Begins.

Playing God with the caped crusader may sound like a small boy’s dream - and Nick admits he’s spent his life sketching comic books and cartoons - but he’s keen to point out that character building, like animation, involves a huge amount of repetition. Woe betides a rigger who puts a bone out of place.

“You have to be precise when building your rig. I once purposely made my students do a rig wrong, and then re-build it,” he smiles. “They were very pissed off, but that repetition is so important - for Batman we did 62 versions of the rig and 38 iterations of the muscle system.” It’s all-too-tempting to quip that character building builds character - although you may well risk repetitive strain disorder in the process.

Nick’s route has been something of a rambling one. When in a band in the mid-80s he became obsessed with synthesizers, mixed some tracks in the studio and ended up working as a sound engineer for five years. It was helping his brother on a corporate video in ‘92 that first broke him into his current trade: “I learned animation; he paid me with a computer,” he states simply. “I’d never touched computers ‘til then.”

When Sega were setting up a new studio, Nick managed to weasel his self-dubbed “crappy” ‘folio in front of them. One small segment made the difference: “A random animation of a psychedelic hippy. He had a pointy hat with a sphere on the end, surrounded by Saturn’s rings. When he bent forward it rotated, dangling in time - it was the secondary animation that caught their eye.”

His seat-of-the-pants journey makes for exhausting listening. He worked in games for five years; was interviewed for Glassworks while his wife was giving birth; eventually became head of the FMV (full motion video) dept, and then moved to into commercials.

After three more years he ended up at Pinewood Studios as a modeller. “They asked if anyone had experience of rigging, and ended up making me Head of Characters. Then I was taken on at Double Negative to work on Batman, where I peaked.”

His first film project, it was a hefty 8-month stint. “By the end I was bored crapless,” he chuckles. “But it’s the only one I actually got my name on the credits: usually there’s a big turnaround of staff - lots of freelancers. People get missed off.”

As the story goes, director Chris Nolan was dubious that a digital Batman would be convincing enough on the big screen, and wanted as much stunt work in camera as possible. Nick was part of a team that set about creating screen tests to be projected next to live action. Christian Bale was body-scanned in full costume, and then the resulting 3D model was equipped with a complex rig, coloured with a bespoke shading system and key-frame animated - no motion capture was used. Thankfully, Nolan was impressed.

“You’re interpreting the world into 3D - not the mechanics, but how something moves,” Nick concludes. “Modelling and skinning is very artistic: how the crease works when an arm bends; how material crumbles under the armpit; how the muscle inflates. It’s how it looks, not necessarily how it works. Then it’s up to the animator to make it move.”

Animation

Seeing animated characters interact with humans in ‘80s toon-gangster flick Who Framed Roger Rabbit sparked creative impulses in Jeff Pratt, an engineer at the time. He opted for a change, went to art school for four years, and fortuitously ended up at the doors of Pixar just as they were gearing up for a second run at Toy Story.

“They’d had story problems, and it was on hold,” he recalls. “At the time I was the fourteenth animator hired; they thought I’d be one of the last. There were 40 in the end.” In such a large team, and with CGI animation requiring increasingly realistic movement, an aptitude in engineering helped him specialise.

“I like the technical aspects,” he admits, small surprise given he started out tinkering with space shuttles for NASA. “Take the spring in Slinky Dog – I was the only animator that could understand how to make it work convincingly, using sine waves and so on.”

And while the traditional process of sketching scenes frame by frame has been replaced by tweaking rigs and walk cycles, roles are also split differently. “For hand-drawn animation, a team is assigned to a certain character to make sure it’s drawn consistently – when you’re working on computer, that’s all defined already,” he points out.

“On a production like Toy Story or Monsters Inc there’s a team of up to 40 animators – you can’t have two animators on one character while the other 38 sit around twiddling their thumbs. You work on the shot as a whole.”

With the whole team dipping into a central pool of characters, it’s essential to get the puppet controls set up properly in the first place. “A modeller and a rigger will work closely with the animators to develop a character and test it,” confirms Jeff. “The more the animator knows about rigging, the better: it helps to understand the whole process.”

Fundamental to all forms of animation is the walk cycle, and as with the character rig, this will be crafted first. “A team of animators will spend two weeks honing it down to minute details, and then it’s used by everyone in production,” he reveals. “You’re always improving: walk cycles are unique to each character, and help to define personality.”

With rival studios pushing each other’s standards higher by the day, it’s crucial to stay across all new developments – and Pixar provides its animators with bespoke preparatory software that’s updated for each production. So with a clutch of seminal CGI masterpieces behind him, what were the peaks?

“For me, milestones are technical ones,” he confesses, perhaps unsurprisingly given his background: “the fur in Monsters Inc; the clothes in The Incredibles. It’s getting close to absolute realism now: motion water works pretty well off-the-shelf; clothing still has its bugs but it’s pretty good.”

So how important were those four years studying tomes of art history, traditional drawing, photography, colour theory and the like? “It’s useful, but none of that is required for animation,” Jeff admits. “A polished 20-second piece will get you a job, not whether you can draw.”

Games

“At some point in the future, the visual quality of Film and Games will be indistinguishable,” foresees Simon Fenton, ex-Sony Computer Entertainment and now creator and tutor of the centre’s Games courses. “But there’s a real demarcation of roles. In film, you could just be a character modeller. In games, until recently a senior artist would do character, environment, assets, everything. Now those roles are starting to separate.”

Equipped with a Fine Art degree in Painting & Printmaking, Simon might not seem like the archetypal gamer – although it was the printmaking process that first got him interested in mechanical reproduction, not so far away from rendering thousands of frames to produce an animation sequence.

“That was 15 years ago, when silicon graphics machines were the price of a house,” he recalls fondly. “The only way to get access to the software was as a runner at a post-production house. So that’s what I did. I taught myself Alias and Softimage in the evenings: I was actually sleeping in the studio to get access to the machines.”

At a similar time, Lee Danskin was starting his career at Alias Research, putting the wheels in motion for the first ever version of Maya. With a visual effects background – he went on to co-found Smoke & Mirrors 3D, before becoming Deputy Head of 3D at influential London post-house MPC – he speaks with a helicopter view.

“Yes, the finished products are converging, but the way you apply tools in the pipeline is very different,” he reasons: clearly the language of a man who’s dealt with budgets and workflows as well as the creative coalface. “You’ll never have to master camera tracking in games, or compositing – they talk about tri-stripping, and how many texels you have.”

Creatively, an understanding of film is useful: “The language of cinematography will come into gaming,” Lee admits. “They’re starting to apply the process of a real-world camera to a virtual camera, so you’re not always bumping into walls jerkily. But you’ll never have to reverse-engineer a virtual camera as you do in the effects industry.”

Particularly with the growth of hi-def consoles, there’s never been higher demand for stunning 3D game graphics – and Simon asserts that the volume of work has quadrupled in recent years. “Studios are outsourcing to India and China to meet the volume, but this can be an unhappy experience if the quality isn’t up to scratch,” he goes on. “As a junior artist in the UK you have to hit the ground running, specialise, and raise your game to make it worth paying you more.”

Win £10,000 of animation training >

Words: Nick Carson
Broomfield portraits: Kate Beatty

“It’s a filmmaker’s responsibility to put together something as accurate as possible,” is the Broomfield manifesto. Following 2006’s acclaimed Ghosts, he’s taken his experiments with ‘real cinema’ to a new level with Battle for Haditha - digging as deeply into the principles of filmmaking as he does the universal issues surrounding this symbolic episode.

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“It’s great fun to play around with style,” Broomfield tells me, citing Day for Night - Truffaut’s much-lauded film about making a film - as a creative influence. Certainly since the journalistic frustrations of 1988’s aptly-titled Driving Me Crazy, he’s carved a name as a figurehead for what pigeonhole enthusiasts call les nouvelles egotistes: a growing breed of doc-makers who are themselves central to the action, together with the likes of Louis Theroux, Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock.

It’s all-too-tempting to pin up his two most recent films as the start of a new chapter in his work, given their deviation from this trademark approach. Both are dramatic interpretations of controversial situations, with no bobbing boom or frantic chase in sight; unlike much of his personality-driven back-catalogue to-date, both stories pivot largely on a specific series of events and the complex repercussions for the many characters involved.

But like his intriguing Anglo-American drawl, or one of his elusive heckled interviewees of past films, Broomfield’s not that easy to box in: for him, both style and substance should remain organic. “I think about one project at a time; I never seem to have a problem finding my next film,” he insists. “I’m not one of these people with a list.”

The latest episode to pique his inquisitive instinct was the death of 24 Iraqi civilians in the small town of Haditha on 19 November 2005, in the aftermath of a blast from an improvised explosive device (IED) that killed a young marine riding in convoy. Whilst initial reports from the US military claimed that the deaths were a direct result of the blast and a subsequent gunfight with hostile insurgents, Iraqi witnesses told a very different story - five unarmed men in a taxi shot dead as they approached the scene, and 19 more killed in three nearby houses in an act of violent retribution over the following hours.

It was an amateur video clearly showing the bodies of women and children shot in their homes, passed to an Iraqi human-rights organisation and then to Time magazine, that laced the affair with doubt. It identified flaws in the marines’ statement, prompting a formal inquiry - although the initial conclusion was that it was collateral damage, things soon spiraled into a full criminal investigation, with several marines on trial for unpremeditated murder. For Broomfield, this was motivation enough to cement the blood-soaked incident as an example.

“I’ve researched lots of subjects that I haven’t followed through,” he admits. “When you’ve got to be with them for a year, a year-and-a-half, you might as well do something that is complicated enough, or has enough mystery to keep you going. I don’t like going into films knowing what the outcome will be: often it’s the discovery that’s exciting; changing your mind; meeting people with sides that you’d never imagined before. That’s what makes it worthwhile and fun.”

It’s a compelling approach: filmmaker both directing the action and being swept up in it. “It’s all to do with storytelling. Any way you can tell the story better so it’s more real, more entertaining, more contemporary, is great to play around with,” is Broomfield’s take. In the case of Battle for Haditha, this involved building a framework from what few indisputable facts were available - and letting the cast improvise the rest.

As with Ghosts - for which the painstaking research process including hiring Chinese students to pose as illegal immigrant workers, and posing as an Afrikaner worker himself to film the results with a hidden camera in his glasses - finding the right cast to carry the film was crucial. Not necessarily just for their acting skills, but for their genuine deep-rooted emotions, experiences and insider-knowledge that could steer both the general atmosphere and finer details more accurately than any stubborn director with a top-down vision.

Understandably, it feels like a documentary-maker’s approach to drama: letting the action unfold as naturalistically as possible. At first he considered going the full distance: tracking down the marines who had lived and breathed the sweat, smoke and blood of Haditha, and asking them to re-enact the events of 19th November 2005. But in the flesh, as he told The Times, they were “fucked up, much too jittery. Some couldn’t keep still when we were talking to them.”

One of the most shocking elements during this initial research period was the marines’ “distressing and vulgar” sense of humour; arguably a coping mechanism to detach them from the shocking things they’d seen and done, but something Broomfield had to fight through, alongside the jitters and the tranquilliser damage, to understand what they were really about.

Unable to work with those directly connected with Haditha - and with the trial just getting under way - the production favoured a more conventional call-out to casting agents with military connections, tapping into servicemen who had recently returned from active duty to keep that emotional resonance without jeopardising the whole project.

The highlight of their nine-month casting call was unearthing 22-year-old ex-marine and aspiring actor Elliot Ruiz, who at 17 had been the youngest solider deployed to Iraq, and had already had his personal story dramatised in a Pulitzer-nominated play. Corporal Ramirez wasn’t any easy first lead role for Ruiz: dredging up all manner of demons, it was a turbulent process that came to a head in an on-screen breakdown with an uncomfortable dose of realism. Iraqi civilians, many of whom had lost loved ones in the conflict, were also persuaded to lend their stories to the film as part of the predominantly amateur cast.

Despite responding to one symbolic episode, this fresh ammunition for the anti-war canon has an intentionally timeless quality. “Things like Haditha happen in any conflict, any war, anywhere,” reasons Broomfield. “The stuff that we filmed after the IED goes off is all based on reports: that’s all accurate, what happened in those houses. But I don’t want this to be seen as a forensic film. Haditha is a symbolic crime, but not such a rarity that it deserves to be looked at in isolation.”

While it may seem that the collective lens of the world’s media has been on Iraq since those first volleys were fired, it’s the other side’s perspective that has been conspicuously absent thus far: and this is the edge Haditha brings to the public debate.

“It’s a film about the language of war, and the common humanity that people share,” he declares. “In any conflict there are different points of view; it’s rarely good and evil. But most journalists have been stuck in the Green Zone throughout, and genuine Iraqi viewpoints are few and far between.”

Accordingly, the research also included flying to Aman to meet civilian survivors of the massacre - “who were there on the day, and knew the people who were killed” - plus spending a week with insurgents who had been directly involved with Haditha, and quizzing the journalist from Time magazine who first broke the story into public consciousness. The next step was securing government reports and witness statements to build as accurate a picture as possible, from multiple sides.

Iraqi witnesses and insiders in the marines told the same story: that the killings were indiscriminate as a knee-jerk reaction to their colleague’s death. Most shocking of all were the protocols he found through conversations with marines: “Their standard operating procedure rules are so fucking hardcore. If a house is described as ‘hostile’, then you just kill everyone in the house. It doesn’t matter if it contains two-year-olds or the elderly.”

But while he admits starting the project with some bias against the marines, meeting them in the flesh and realising that these were poverty-stricken kids with little or no education, thousands of miles from home in a conflict they didn’t understand, muddied the waters somewhat: “The deeper I dug into the whole story, the harder I realised it was to take a side. It was hard to condemn them out of hand as cold-blooded killers. I hope people will feel that judgment should be passed on the war itself, the architects of the war, and the future of the war. These are just poor bastards who got caught up in it.”

“Everyone has some kind of blinkered view, and it’s interesting that in some of the cinema discussions after the film, the two main camps realised just how blinkered they are. That’s what happens in war - but most traditional war films tend to be black and white, good and bad.”

Broomfield’s already made it clear that beyond the factual framework, the cast should make the piece their own, so I ask how he sees his own role in the production - particularly in still relatively unfamiliar dramatic territory.

“I enable people to deliver their performances in as relaxed a way as possible, and as real a way as possible,” he responds, after a short pause and a contemplative hmm. “It’s creating an environment that people can work in that makes them feel alright to be themselves, particularly if you’re working with non-actors. They shouldn’t be embarrassed: you want them for who they are.”

Of course, dramatic interpretation or not, Battle for Haditha has a grounding in fact - and was released while the trial was still in progress - so surely directorial control was crucial in places? “When dealing with specific milestones in the report, details from a legal document, we had to control people pretty tightly,” he confirms. “They couldn’t say whatever they wanted in those situations.”

“We worked from a pretty rigid structure of the story, but I was often steered by what they had to contribute: ‘We wouldn’t do it this way; we’d do it this way.’ I let them use their own language, being mindful that I didn’t want them acting being a marine: I wanted them being themselves. In a sense, they’re the experts - you don’t need one of those experts standing by.”

Given their deeply personal roots in the conflict, and intimate connections with its victims, surely the cast had their own agendas, even if the director endeavoured to avoid one of his own? “The film is all about agendas,” is the simple answer. “The marines, the insurgents, the people who get caught between those two forces, all have their own rationale for what they do. It’s about presenting those three agendas as accurately as possible, to an audience who probably has their own preconceptions.”

“Showing the film around, an Iraqi audience is very pro insurgents - would they even have taken money to do what they did? They see them as patriots. An American audience is always much more defensive about the marines.”

Three strands of narrative bind the film together, representing these three viewpoints: the pair of newly-recruited insurgents paid to plant the IED, the marines who seek revenge for its fatal detonation, and the civilians who are cut down indiscriminately as a result - several of whom see the bomb being planted in their quiet neighbourhood and choose to keep quiet.

While the brutality of the wider insurgency comes across, the two that plant the bomb are nervous and inexperienced, acting clumsily in the name of patriotism - but tellingly manage to flee the scene unharmed as gunfire erupts. The marines are brutal, dehumanised and reduced to killing machines by fear and rage, but ultimately emerge as pawns in a game much larger than themselves, endorsed by orders from above and crippled by remorse.

Iraqi civilian life is sketched out in various short episodes - a party to celebrate a circumcision, a boy playing with a goat, a family going to market - but this third group is finally crushed from both sides, with nowhere to turn. Crucially for Broomfield, all involved re-creating elements of their own lives, not acting several stages removed from it.

Some 15 years before Ghosts, his first venture into directing drama - 1989’s glossy Hollywood fare Diamond Skulls - he found overwhelming as a process, and readily admits to being embarrassed by the end result. Does mindless escapism and detachment from reality just not appeal?

“All forms of storytelling are interesting; I just happen to have grown up in a tradition of documentaries,” he reflects. “But I don’t like celebrity and all that goes with it: I enjoy getting to know normal people and their lives. For me, it’s about combining that with telling a structured story in an accessible way.”

Unlike that self-confessed blip on Broomfield’s CV, both Ghosts and Battle for Haditha shun the studio lights and contrived repetition of Hollywood to reveal something deeper about those involved.

“These are not pseudo actors; they’re real people who are being themselves,” he asserts. “That means you have to shoot in a different way; in real environments. You can’t shoot them on a set ’cause then they have to act, and they have no training in acting; they don’t know that the fuck they’re doing.”

Based in Jordan - Iraq was clearly too dangerous - the cast and crew lived as a community. “I had to create a barracks for the marines to live in, and the Iraqis were living in houses. If you’re shooting reverse angles, lighting the be-Jesus out of something and having hundreds of people standing around the set, you’ve got to have actors. It’s very, very difficult.”

By way of example, the bathroom in which Ruiz breaks down - purging himself of all those years of pent up anguish - doesn’t open up into a world of runners, tracks and dollies. It’s the actual bathroom used by the cast and crew. Maintaining the ‘real cinema’ approach are very long cuts. For the heart-rending mourning scene, the camera rolled for 40 minutes straight - no-one was going to ask the genuinely distressed women to go one more time for luck.

“I think the greatest thing that film has is the ability to describe real time,” argues Broomfield. “I don’t like lots of cuts: it’s really interesting to see a conversation, for example, or how long it takes for an argument to develop, rather than just cutting to an argument. We’re used to seeing things in real time, and cinema has the exciting ability to do that.”

“I grew up with anthropological, observational films, where the most interesting thing was seeing a long conversation between two guys in some weird language with subtitles. You get a sense of their rhythm, how they do things, what their humour’s like - no other art-form can do that.”

For Haditha he picked up countless tricks from special effects supervisor David Harris, including how to set up action shots to keep a lot of movement in the camera. “Certain things, particularly action, are also much more involving in real time than if you cut to the effect all the time,” he concludes. “It’s much more threatening if the human eye sees it as being real.”

Words: Catherine Bray

Mike Leigh’s award-winning Happy-Go-Lucky was touted as a change of pace for a director of reputedly dour films. Here, he sets the record straight and tells us exactly why he’s pleased to have made an anti-miserablist, anti-Hollywood piece of art.

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“People can talk any amount of crap they like. Anyone who wants to say Happy-Go-Lucky is devoid of social commentary is just plain stupid.” Mike Leigh is coming out fighting, or at least wearily prepared to rebuff the flurry of film press articles seemingly desperate to foist a Leigh-goes-fluffy angle on the Brit director’s latest film about chirpy primary school teacher Poppy.

“Obviously this film has got plenty to say about the way we live; the way we teach; the way we learn; the way we have relationships; the way we interact with people; the way people accumulate ideas and don’t know what to do with them. It’s a film about love; surviving; dealing with problems - I mean, you name it,” he continues. “It’s rooted in social issues, so in that sense it’s implicitly political. It’s just not a tract; it’s not a piece of propaganda of some kind.”

In non-descript slacks, military green shirt, navy sleeveless fleece and neatly-trimmed beard, Mike looks more like an off-duty bus driver when we meet in the Soho Hotel than any stereotypical mirror-shaded, mad-haired, multi-award-winning director. Mid-way through the press period for his then yet-to-be released film, the idiosyncratic director has had plenty of chance to get bored of explaining that he hasn’t made a Bridget Jones-style tale of a single London lady’s trials and tribulations.

But at least on the surface, the film in question - Happy-Go-Lucky - confounds some expectations of what a Mike Leigh film might be like. This is after all the man who brought us the neurotic, middle-class tension of Abigail’s Party, the proto-Shameless travails of Life Is Sweet, a rapist for a protagonist in Naked, the bleak backstreet abortion drama of Vera Drake, and countless other explorations of the kind of themes you won’t see Jerry Bruckheimer going near any time soon.

Happy-Go-Lucky, by contrast, follows the mostly cheery everyday adventures of a North London primary school teacher as she begins driving lessons with pitiable conspiracy theorist Scott. There are no abortions, rapes or deaths. As Mike would probably be quick to point out, this is a simplistic, plot-oriented way of arriving at the conclusion that Happy-Go-Lucky marks some kind of Pollyanna watershed in his body of work.

Mike Leigh films do all have something in common, but that something is not misery. Even his bleakest films have plenty of humour, making the Mike Leigh x-factor hard to pin down.”My impulse, my compunction, is to make films that show life in a real way, as it is,” he suggests. “So why manufacture a kind of quasi, pseudo-moral thing?”

It’s clear that in attempting to pin down common characteristics in his work, it’s almost easier to talk about what a film is not. Which is precisely what Mike does when I suggest that it’s good to see a wholesome character not punished somehow for her wide-eyed approach to life: “The putative film you’re implicitly invoking, which is the film where somebody’s goodness comes back to haunt them, is simply another sort of film with another set of preoccupations.”

Such precise, almost lawyerly, language - putative, implicit, invoke - betrays an interviewee who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and, you sense, has had to deal with a number of misconceived interpretations of this film.Mike states baldly: “I’m not concerned to create synthetic plot-lines, and patronise the audience accordingly. People have said, ‘Why doesn’t something horrible happen to her?’ Actually, when she’s finally in the car with Scott in that last driving lesson, it pretty well does, but she knows how to deal with it.”

It’s from the apparent cul-de-sac of imaginary patronising films that one of Mike’s central concerns emerges: the irrelevance of Hollywood to what he sees as worthwhile in film. I ask why films crammed with synthetic plotlines that patronise the audience are so popular - people seem to watch them?

“The question is not so much why people watch them: they watch them because they’re there,” he argues. “Why are those films there? is the question. And the answer to that, I’m afraid, goes back to the roots of how cinema in the world functions. Somewhere during the First World War, and then helped by the entry into the Second World War of the United States, Hollywood started to dominate the world market with the ethos that films have to be simplistic and formulaic. Sadly, we’re all imbued with that.”

As his new film suggests, it’s not all doom and gloom in the film industry according to Mike. “Actually, at any given moment - even as we speak - there are all sorts of interesting, entertaining, important films being made in different languages that don’t embrace those formulaic criteria.”It’s a bracket in which this director would place his own work: “I see my films in a world cinema context, not an Anglo-Hollywood context. But people see film this way, and watch Hollywood pictures, because that’s what’s there.”What’s there is starting to change with the advent of long-tail distribution, something Mike implicitly welcomes: “The good news is, partly because some barriers have been broken down and partly because of DVD, what people are watching is getting to be more comprehensive.”

But what constitutes a good film? The London-based director is certainly not anti-American per se. Just one of his favourite recent films, Irish effort Garage, doesn’t hail from the States, although the directors he salutes - the Coen Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, Jason Reitman - are broadly on the indie side of things.Expanding on what makes a good film, the idea of veracity is crucial to Mike: “To me, a film can only be interesting if it’s rooted in reality. Things can only be funny if they’re rooted in reality, and things can only be tragic if they’re rooted in reality. All those elements, so far as I’m concerned, are on the go in this film.”

All of this is central to understanding how this director works. His ‘process’ is legendary, and it repels some actors just as it repeatedly attracts others, with regulars having included Timothy Spall, Alison Steadman (Mike’s ex-wife), Lesley Manville and Jim Broadbent.There is no script for a Mike Leigh film, simply an idea, and a lengthy rehearsal process will involve workshopping characters, improvising dialogue and scenes, with Mike then tying the emergent material into a collaborative, coherent whole. As the man himself - who has been tagged ‘Britain’s Bergman’ - puts it: “Films like this come out of a warm, sharing collaboration. The whole thing about directing, authority and all those things isn’t really relevant.”

Beginning his career with a stint at RADA and a couple of 1963 bit-part TV and film roles, Mike is hugely enthusiastic about acting as a craft. “I love it. I love actors. Having started life training as an actor, to me my mission in life is to elevate acting to being a creative art, and to elevate actors to being creative artists, not just people who show up, read their lines and, like we used to say, don’t fall over the furniture.”

It’s a subject on which Mike can enthuse at length, and in doing so, he loosens up a lot. He expresses deep affection for his band of regulars and when asked whether he keeps up with the careers of favourites like Timothy Spall his accent broadens as he replies with a cackle, “Can’t help it mate! If Tim’s on I’ll go out of my way to see it. I stay friends with actors and hang out with them.”

It’s a far cry from Alfred Hitchcock’s infamous statement: “Actors are cattle.” Although Hitch would later amend this - “I never said actors were cattle; all I said was that actors should be treated as cattle” - it’s still a world away as a sentiment from Mike’s avowed interest in the actor as an involved artist, and his proud passion for the level of talent on offer in this country. “The thing is, you know, we are blessed with fantastic actors here in the UK. There are too many very good actors I’d like to work with for me to ever get around to working with all of them.”

Luckily for Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan and the rest of the cast, Mike did find the time to work with them, resulting in what has been described as Sally’s break-out role, and the latest in Eddie’s string of successful character roles, which have seen him work with everyone from Tom Cruise on Mission Impossible III to Terrence Malick on The New World.

In Happy-Go-Lucky, this collaborative journey of cast and crew has resulted in what the film’s director describes as “a bright, energetic, positive experience that, I hope, makes you feel like life is worth living. But within it are darknesses and sadnesses of various kinds, and in various places, which are there for Poppy to react to, deal with and care about. As such, hopefully it’s a complex film - for all that it has its comic and celebratory side.”

The ‘brightness’ of the film refers not only emotional timbre, but quite literally to its kaleidoscopic palette. With vibrant cobalt blues, tiger-lily oranges and screaming magenta leaping off the screen, Happy-Go-Lucky doesn’t look quite like the majority of Mike Leigh films, and it’s the first time he’s used widescreen. “That reflects the energy and explosiveness of the film, as does the colour,” he explains.

While Mike insists that his directorial attitude has remained consistent across the lifespan of his career, he’s happy to admit to having refined his work stylistically. “All artists, the more you do, the more you learn, you hone your skills, and in some ways you may move on. In principle I’m doing the same kind of thing. Apart from anything else, Nuts in May is delightful - but it’s a very crude piece of film-making, done very quickly. Happy-Go-Lucky is a highly-sophisticated, beautiful piece of film-making.”

He’s also stuck close to home for much of his career: true to form, you’ll see a lot of London in Happy-Go-Lucky, although Mike insists that it’s something of a red-herring to regard the city as integral to the action, as some reviews have. “London becomes an implicit character in the film, but it’s not a film about London as such. You could make the film anywhere. I’ve made lots of films in London, because it’s cheaper. We can’t really afford to go away from base.”

As our interview draws to a close, I wonder, broadly speaking, whether it’s possible to fit Happy-Go-Lucky into a narrative of current trends in British film, or British film, perhaps, as it should be? Mike’s reply suggests that for all his reputation for social critique, he wouldn’t want to be too didactic about things.

“Happy-Go-Lucky is one film. There’s all kinds of stuff that’s going on. I’ve already implicitly expressed a view about films that are made for cynical reasons. But to be honest, I’m not really disposed to say, ‘Well this is how films should be, Poppy’s the sort of character we should see more of,’ or anything like that. This is this film. I think, and I suppose I hope, that it’s quite unique in its own way, with its own box of tricks.”

Love or hate Happy-Go-Lucky - and there will be plenty of people who find a character as determinedly positive as Poppy irritating - in an age in which we’re constantly being told we’re all heading to hell in a handbasket, it’s refreshing to encounter film-making that walks a path between straightforward escapism and miserablist hand-wringing.Mike views this through the prism that is his central character: “Poppy’s a teacher. She’s like many millions of people in the world who are getting on with it. Yes, we’re destroying the planet, we’re destroying each other - it’s bad news. But this is not a planet entirely populated by a lot of people sitting around committing suicide and wringing their hands. People are out there getting on with it, and not least the people who are teaching children. In that sense I wanted to make an anti-miserablist film.”

The type of character who just gets on with it, helps others and acts unselfishly has an interesting history in the Anglo-Hollywood films from which Mike aims to distance himself. Commonly, an impulse to save and protect individuals or people en masse culminates in self-sacrifice, whether of life or self-interest. It’s a narrative thread you can find in most genres, from cheesy big-budget action behemoths (think of Bruce Willis exploding himself to unintentionally hilarious effect in Armageddon to save the world, his friends and especially his hot daughter), to popularly acclaimed classics (see: Humphrey Bogart letting the woman he loves go in Casablanca).

In Happy-Go-Lucky, Poppy’s nurturing drive to protect and save people doesn’t demand a sacrifice of this type, placing the film outside of the conventional path followed by this type of character. This is partly a function of the genre - not too many north London primary teachers are called upon to sacrifice life or love for the good of humankind - but also of a desire to step outside convention. Or am I wrong? “No, I don’t think that’s wrong,” responds Mike. “I think the point is it’s not a simplistic film that you can easily sum up. I hope it works, if it works, because it’s real and therefore the characters are real and resonant and layered.”

Clearly Mike Leigh is a director who cares about the experience of watching his films, as well as making them. What is he aiming for in this respect with Happy-Go-Lucky? “You go on an emotional journey when you watch this film. People have said, ‘I watched this film and I felt good and positive,’ but some people have also said, ‘I actually felt I wanted to cry,’ so you go through a lot of things.”

“Lots of people have told me that they assumed because it was called Happy-Go-Lucky, and because everything seemed to be going so well, that something bad would happen. They’ve said, ‘I thought I was being manipulated.’” And here, the man who has just released his first avowedly anti-miserablist film, twinkles with a rare smile. “You’re not being manipulated. Not by me.”

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